Friday Fragments

I won another Spanish lottery yesterday. This time it was the El Gordo Loteria Primitiva, which translates roughly as "the fat Stone-Age lottery" (I'm at least 15% positive about this translation). For people keeping score, this is the second Spanish lottery that I've won . I plan to use my winnings to buy gift cards for regular readers, and to promote world awareness. We all live in the world -- it's time you realized that.

The results of the last poll on children are listed in the entry from August 2. Fifty percent of those responding do not want any kids at all! I'm currently in discussions with the Food and Drug Administration to promote Uri!Zone as a viable form of contraception. I'm also hoping that there are some seriously whacked-out side effects to mention in my commercial, such as "may cause excessive drainage of ear wax at socially unacceptable times". Alyssa Milano will play the wife worried about pregnancy and Carrot Top will be the husband who recommends Uri!Zone. Dakota Fanning will be the random gratuitous "kid on a swing set wearing bright primary colours while slightly out-of-focus camera pans across scene".

My place of work has free sodas. When I first started as an intern five years ago, I would drink a non-diet soda every hour, every day. Now I carry a water bottle around like a shameless yuppy and only have one soda at lunchtime. This means I have imbibed about 546,000 fewer calories over the past two years. It would logically follow that I have a buffer of about 1070 Quarter Pounders with Cheese before I start to gain weight again. Right?

The exceptionally dull saga of the sidewalk ended last weekend, and now you can walk from the front of the house to the back of the house without getting your feet muddy. I figured there were no readers on the edges of their seats waiting for a resolution, so I held off on posting pictures until today. Shaping concrete is fun -- it's like ooblick. I think my dad and I moved about four tons worth of concrete mix over the past year.

I don't understand why people like cheese puffs. They melt away to nothing in your mouth, have no texture, and leave everything covered in a grimy gold paste which might or might not be leprechaun vomit. There is actually a Cheetos-brand of Cheese Puff. Is there any compelling reason to take a tasty snack like a Cheeto and mutilate its core flavour just so it's puffy?

The first season of Lost comes out on DVD one month from tomorrow, and the second season begins on TV at the end of September. This is very exciting. If you don't watch Lost, what the hell is wrong with you? Watch it. Peer pressure is key. I'm still waiting for Abercrombie & Fitch to come out with a "jungle island" line of frat boy clothes, modelled around the picture-perfect clothing in the luggage of Flight 815.

I'm at a loss as to what this song is trying to say (407KB MP3). Is it happy? Sad? A love song or a leave song? The lyrics aren't much help, but either way it has an interesting, unsettling sound to it. At least it's not a really horrible lesbian Russian cover, or Macy Gray singing Walk This Way.

There was a story in the Post about a subcontractor for NCS Pearson who made $24 million after 9/11 for hotel and event planning . The head of the fly-by-night company paid herself $5.4 million and a $270,000 pension. The cutest part of the article is the line, "Her friends dismissed the possibility of impropriety, saying she and Sullivan are both devout Christians who would never take advantage of the government for personal gain." She now lives in a $1.9 million devout mansion.

My social schedule has been a little lacking this week since I've been busy working on my music presentations for work. I'm working on the Western Music presentation now. I plan on warming up the audience with a little Josquin, and then scaring the pee out of them with a little Ligeti. I hope there are important business meetings in the adjoining conference rooms when I play an excerpt from Continuum. I am also at a loss to decide who should represent the culmination of Western Music at the end of the twentieth century: Britney Spears or the Backstreet Boys.

While doing online research for the presentation, I came across the Giovanni Gabrielli Forum Frigate . I'm not exactly sure what's going on there, but I guess you're just supposed to chat about Gabrielli as if you were a pirate. "Yarr, we love the antiphonal brass, we do!" I also looked up the publication date on Aaron Copland's Hoedown only to get an entry on the hoedowns from the British version of Who's Line Is It Anyways?. Richard Vranch was so much better than the creepy women on the ABC version.

I have not really played World of Warcraft in about two weeks now. There are too many other fun and exciting distractions in the real world.

I want to take over the world, if only to have journalists at my beck and call. Apparently Kim Jong-il has a superhuman brain and could easily outsmart the Great Brain if he wanted to. Kim provides tips for brain enhancement such as, "A person's memory gets better when they use their brain often". I don't think I would have been able to figure that out on my own. Thank you, Kim, you do credit to dictators everywhere.

There's no Poker Night this week, but three weeks in a row is a pretty good record. I'm currently down by $20, but now that I've won the Spanish lottery I'm just going to buy back in continuously until everyone goes broke or falls asleep. The only interesting hand I've won was beating a King-high flush with the Ace.

Enjoy your weekend while it lasts. There's only 141 shopping days until Christmas, and Shoppers Food Warehouse is already selling Halloween candy!

Newspaper declares open season on woman's apartmentHarris complains about newspapers without actually saying anythingTallahassee man fakes murder to get his wife to leave him